Just wanted to put this here. I think it’s important that all watch it, it doesn’t matter what your political ideals are, this Documentary shows what is really going on. The media hates to bring light to any thing that President Trump does that is positive to the citizens of the United States or even the World. He has a great record of making things better but you have to look past the media with their millions of dollars coming in from political campaigns, special interest groups, elites, and people out of touch with what is needed to be done to keep our country moving in a positive direction.

Below is the YouTube copy of the Documentary. I am amazed that they have been able to keep it on that site with the growing history of censorship of the big tech companies who calmed to support a free and open internet as long as it kept their sites on the internet.

Take the hour and a half to watch this. If it dose not awaken some thoughts of what the media and politicians are up to in pushing violence and misinformation in a negative way towards Trump and his supporters than you must really be asleep.

I did some gaming on it earlier and it was great, and I was doing great in the game. The RGB lighting is kind of cool but if you’re not doing something that takes a lot of paying attention to the screen you end up noticing a rainbow of colors over the keys. I know I can switch it to all kinds of things but this was fun for the first night.

When typing so far I have done good at hitting the correct keys and the feeling of pushing down the keys is good, I almost need to have a lighter touch. There is a good amount of that mechanical sound that you know when you are typing. But not so much its annoying. If it was in an office and you did typing or coding next to people it could be a problem. I would also guess because of the frequency of the sound a phone or VOIP call would pick up every key stroke.

I plan on using this one in my home office where I don’t care about sound so much. I had a Dell Alienware keyboard that was not as noise, but had decent switches. They don’t give you a brand so who knows what they are, the only thing I could find was they were like the Brown switches by Cherry MX. Because that keyboard isn’t that loud and I want something better for typing and coding at work I will take it in and use it there.

Other than the normal spelling mistakes I have been able to type out things fast and with good accuracy in this post. If you do lots of typing a good keyboard could improve productivity and just make it nicer to type. There are quieter keys, and other companies who make keyboards with these switches, so if you wanted something more “professional” you could get one of those for less because the RGB is not something you really need. ~600 Words in about 10 minutes with some time to think and look at the other keyboard is quite good.

Who really needs social media? Why do we put up with the collection and selling of our activity data? It’s been documented over and over that we are a product to sell. Obama was cheered on that they scraped all of Facebook’s data to use it for political use, now a company used Facebook data users agreed to give them, and purely because Trump’s campaign used this company people are losing their minds.

Get off social media, find content with real value, and do your own research. If you have something to say, write a blog on a site you control

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So I thinking “I haven’t logged in to my blog in a few I should see if it needs updates” then I was getting errors with some cache plugin or the built in one, not really sure but I was also having problems connecting to DreamHost sites at work and then all I could pull up was a white page for everything. Of course WordPress has had many “White Page” errors some have to do with plugins, others with memory, or database problems. Ether way you get no error message even with error reporting on. Finally traced it down to just needing to disable the WordPress cache in the config and everything came back up, with a few problems with my Theme, just had to reinstall it and now its back.

I would love to dump WordPress, but it just kind of works. I did lose some of my interest in blogging, its not the “cool thing” for a lot of people. But I think I want to get back into it. I also have noticed that since most of the “how to sites” no longer link to my post on how to fix handbrake and they just took my steps almost word for word, traffic is way down to the site. So moving the important posts to something new wouldn’t be too bad they would get re-indexed and still show up when people look for them.

This could be a good opportunity for me to take some of my CMS tools I have build for my works site and move them into my site. No more broken WordPress, with its vulnerabilities and slow performance. But its a lot of work getting my system built up and not as just drop in some images and bang out a few paragraphs when I want to add something. The text input isn’t too bad, but I haven’t built a great solution for uploading images and files just things that get a simple job done.

Another thing about building my own solution is that I like using PHP and MySQL, and that is what my CMS starter code is in. But I would like to learn ASP.net Core and build a site with it, but my hosting is LAMP. Anyway I will just leave it like it is and hopefully get motivated sometime to make something new. At least start posting once a week would be good.

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Wow it looks like it has been over a year and I once again have had nothing good to say on my blog! Not sure if that is good or bad, I probably share too much stuff on Facebag but meh, it takes 2 seconds as I scroll through stuff and find it interesting or informative. The political climate has changed and normally rational people are losing it, and big tech companies would rather see themselves implode over identity politics then just make cool stuff with the world’s data. But that’s not why I write on here, it’s mostly a public spew of something’s happening to me or what not.

This new keyboard is super easy to type on but it needs a wrist wrest, let’s see if it feels better with just the old one propped up, humm yes but not as easy to move my fingers to the keys. BRB off to Amazon…

Amazon what is this a baguette wrist rest!

There the black normal one looks ok will see.

So I did start a new job doing IT, web work, and other programming. It kind of gets all the areas I am good at into one so it keeps me interested. They also have sent me on a few business trips and that has been fun because I get to see some places I probably would have never visited and get paid to do it. Another good thing is it’s in the town I have lived in and would have never though they existed but boom there it is so that’s cool. Just past 6 months so I am a permanent employee so it’s going good.

I was all interested in getting an Amateur Radio Licence but it was kind of off-putting being around the guys who do it, as most are old and just want to do contacts and can’t really get into messing with radio tech so that’s kind of lame. I think I will still go for my General licence so I have a large set of frequencies to work with, and now that I have good money coming in I could get some equipment.

My grandpa turned 90 a few months back, that’s a long time! We had a little party and all hung out with him on a long weekend and that was good. I think a thing that has kept him going was staying active, getting out and doing things, living a clean life, and keeping positive. It’s amazing to think all the things he has lived through and still have been just young enough to have missed some of the bad things. He was in World War 2 but was training after Europe was liberated and was going to get shipped to the Pacific but was probably saved by the dropping of the bombs and the end of the war. He ended up spending his time in the service helping guys get home so that’s still a necessary task. Because he and my grandma grew up after the great depression they were very frugal and did some good investments, resulting in an active retirement from a bank locksmith.

Any way I am working hard at a new job, still need to finish my degree, just some pesky math classes getting in my way but I will try to do them around working. I also haven’t don any robotics or programming things in a while so I probably should do some of that, along with reading since I really haven’t had time or willpower to do much of that after a full day at work. I think I will be starting to plan out a new computer build soon. The new generation of processors are out, and a lot of things are down in price due to some economic booming and I actually have some money haha. Humm those guys I worked for last winter still owe me a few thousand… Anyway say no to Socialism and work hard and enjoy the rewards.

I am writing to you today because we are at a crossroad in our efforts to obtain passage of The Amateur Radio Parity Act.

Our legislative efforts scored a major victory in our campaign when The Amateur Radio Parity Act, H.R. 1301, passed in the House of Representatives yesterday, September 12th. The legislation now moves to the Senate, where we need every Senator to approve the bill.

You are one of over 730,000 licensed Amateur Radio Operators living in the United States. Many of you already live in deed-restricted communities, and that number grows daily.

NOW IS THE TIME FOR ALL HAMS TO GET INVOLVED IN THE PROCESS!

If you want to have effective outdoor antennas but are not currently allowed to do so by your Home Owner’s Association, SEND THESE EMAILS TODAY!!

If you already have outdoor antennas, but want to support your fellow hams, SEND THESE EMAILS TODAY!!

If you want to preserve your ability to install effective outdoor antennas on property that you own, SEND THESE EMAILS TODAY!!

We need you to reach out to your Senators TODAY! Right away.

Help us in the effort. Please go to this linked website and follow the prompts:

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At this point in my degree I have finished all my Computer Science course and am just left with some math and science classes, so close to the end yet a little bit left. I would consider myself a well-rounded coder with experience writing simple console apps, to websites, to complex website content management systems, to Windows apps that use databases. I have participated in robot challenges, startup competitions, added and worked existing code for production applications, converted vital databases, and worked as a group to develop web applications.

All that being said I find the act of writing code for an application fun and exciting at times. You have to figure out the problem, find ways to deal with data, and then output something useful. This can be a challenge at times because there is never any two problems the same, yes there are things you can reuse but almost never has someone written code to do exactly what you are doing. I think that’s part of the reason I enjoy it.

But some times you have to be in the right place to really let things come out, environment can have an effect on distractions, comfort, availability of resources, alertness, and even mood. Another thing that seems to drive some coding is truly having something you want to work on, I have had lots of things that were interesting to me, but I didn’t have the drive to work on them when given the opportunity. I have also found I want to work on something but don’t because other things come up. This doesn’t mean when I need to get things done because I have responsibilities to get it done or there is intensive to do so that I can’t or don’t always find a way to get what I need to do done.

I guess what I am saying there is times when it is easier because I am really interested in something or I want to solve a problem, and I can buckle down and get lots done in a short amount of time. Writing code is a real mental process, you have to think about logic, how things are given to you, the users, the task to solve, and how to get it all done. You can get stuck in your mind working on the problem and it will stick with you night and day until you solve it by writing the code. Sometimes it seems like your avoiding the problem but it will be stirring around in your mind.

Starting to ramble now, I guess what I am saying is that I have found something that can really drive my brain to solve problems, and keep me interested. I just now have to finish up classes and see what opportunities come my way to give me a place to use my abilities and enjoy doing it. I think it is closer than I even know but that wait is what makes it hard. Every thing I get involved with I do see some value in helping me see more of the world both in code and with others. That’s all for now, I shouldn’t blog so late at night…

PS: WOW my number of visitors has dropped over the past year, Handbreak must have passes its usefulness and I really haven’t been adding much content but once every 6 months. I should (like I always say) add more posts, guess I should actually try that with code blog posts.

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Humm it has been some time since I have posts on this site let alone even check up on it. I let it do its updates and that’s about it. Do I not have anything to blog about? Not sure, there has been a lot going on in my life between school, programming projects, robotics, 3D printing, movies, TV shows, events I have been involved with. I don’t know but I guess blogging has been something I forgot about. There is lots of places to post junk but I don’t even do much if any posting on sites like Google+ or Facebook.

It may have something to do with the fact that I want to rebuild this site as a blog but not on WordPress because I don’t see the value in WordPress or its junk ecosystem. I have other sites I should be posting about my projects as I get closer to the end of my CS degree. Like my profile site has been rebuilt quickly to clean out a broken Drupal install. I have some plans on how to make that into a better repository of my work / projects. But that stuff doesn’t need to be here.

Typing this has been kind of interesting… But I should be working on some code I also want to get done. But writing words about something is different than code. And this post will be some rambling any way. My site visits have dropped a lot, mostly because a LifeHacker writer rewrote my post on Handbrake DVD ripping and no longer link over. I have also not been able to get Handbrake to work on my system last time I tried 6 months ago.

It’s late and this post wont make much since, I will probably rebuild the site and put my code snippets here using my own CMS setup. Mehh

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I really hate how sites that have lots of ads always try to guilt you if you block the ads you had no plan on ever looking at or clicking. Take the screen shot in this post, the site says they spend $20,000 on hosting. What that’s a crazy amount of money for a site is not main stream. What are they spending over $1,600 a month on most dedicated server hosting costs for a good server $200-400 a month that could handle anything this site could send to it.

OK so that is a lot of money for servers so this guy must be poor and not make any money. But look you can get a “Premium Ad Free” account with them for $0.11 per day, that adds up to a few cents over $40 per year. Doesn’t sound too bad right? Well if you look at their forms used for registration on the site there are 30,306 registered members. And if only say 25% of them are so into this site they pay the $40 a year to be a “Premium” member that is a nice $303,060 little lump of cash. Even at 10% your looking at $121,224 a year from such members.

Those calculations of well over $100,000 a year of income from premium members didn’t include money made from ads that almost everyone else dose not block and may click from time to time because they get tricked into clicking on ads when they though that the ad was part of the site. The money from ads can be quite large for a site with good amounts of traffic that this site seems to get based on users. My own site that I have 2 ads per page on gets on average 100 views a day gets me about $100 a year or every other year. I don’t push my ads, I don’t care if you block them, its cool to get a little extra money but that isn’t the content of the site.

I just get tired of people acting like because people block the ads, the trackers, the like buttons, the email list pop ups that they are some how ripping off or making it so the site can’t possibly survive if you don’t see the ads. If I am looking for something to buy I go looking for it, I don’t need some ad to tell me to buy it. The ads just confuse people most of the time, are not entirely relevant, and distracting from why I went to a site. So I will continue to block ads and I don’t care for one instance your site will not exist if you don’t get me to see your crappy ads.